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Fall/Winter 2009-10
tom oristaglio
scott summers
cindy childress
tom rechtin
james b. nicola
debra rymer
doug draime
corey mesler
rebecca schumejda
chris crittenden
arlene ang
joey nicoletti
brad johnson
lorie allred
elizabeth kay
alexander russo
nissa lee
kenneth gurney
jessi lee gaylord
keith brighouse
ajay vishwanathan
ethel rohan
william "cully" bryant
julie steiner
Steiner Interview
by Alex Nodopaka
Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Alex Nodopaka
Patrick Carrington
Mannequin Envy in memory of poet and artist Douglas Gamrath
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Charles Adés Fishman
Head on a Frozen Lake
Long Island, 2003
Profoundly separate
from the rest of its body,
the head sat upright in ice.
Without a neck or spine
to comfort it, the head
grew quiet: not yet a skull,
it still had eyes that stared,
unblinking, at the winter morning.
The head no longer knew
its race or gender its ethnicity
or age its name. What little
it could see left it passionless
what it could hear, rushing the length
of the dimly glimmering lake,
registered as static as aural blur.
Fate had brought it to this unlikely
place and no test no eclectic
intelligence could decipher its history.
Whose head was this that adorned
the frozen lake and had to be chain-sawed
from the ice? Surely, it would put a scare
in anonymous children. Could the head think,
would it ask unanswerable questions?
If it had speech, would it teach or demur?
Would its voice have the cold clarity
of ringing bells?
In the Wave
1.
The first space in the parking lot
is empty. When I reach the sweep
of shoreline, I put down my things
and enter: the water is translucent,
temperate. I swim in the soft curl
of a wave, swim steadily, letting the wave
hold me — it can have what I have —
such cold and patient embraces! Time slows
to a swirl, and when I tire my feet touch
bottom — a slow ridge of sand that lifts
perfectly.
2.
A well-built blonde, an iron-pumper,
floats upstream against the tidal wash
of the sun. She wears a thong-bottomed
bikini and pulls the pins from her hair.
Her eyes are vacant or triumphant — I can't
tell which — and her hands hold the bra-top
she has mistaken for a lariat or a live
Tennessee rattler. She exults in her dance,
her almost total nudity, and reaches for the sky,
bends over to adjust her ankles. Her hair
blows in the wind, and I put my book away —
let the old laureate slumber!
3.
Sea wind, blow through me. You know I am
barely here, that the gull who shrieks
his warning over my head is more reliable.
With your salt breath, your trance-deepened
wisdom — you quiet me. Scoured by you, I soften.
I breathe again the first smells of childhood:
the wide ocean of my mother's body, smoke
in my father's hair, and you, wind from the sea,
bearing fresh news of the planet. Your hand on me
now opens my closed-off heart.
Charles Adés Fishman's books of poetry include Country of Memory (Uccelli Press), a finalist in the 2005 Paterson Poetry Prize competition, and Chopin's Piano (Time Being, 2006), recipient of the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. He received a NYFA fellowship in poetry in 1995, and his second booklength collection, The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech, 1989), an ALA/Choice Outstanding Book of the Year, was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. His anthology, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, will be out from Time Being Books in November.
"Body Language"
Jennifer Balkan
Previously published at Mannequin Envy:
After the Death-Camp Newsreels
~ For my daughter ~
Brushing the place now,
a half-hour later, I swear to you
this face you kissed still burns.
email: carolus@optonline.net and personal website. |
Charles Adés Fishman is director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at Farmingdale State University and poetry editor of New Works Review. His books include Mortal Companions, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and The Death Mazurka, which was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His most recent collections are Country of Memory (Uccelli Press), and 5,000 Bells (Cross-Cultural Communications), both 2004, and Chopin’s Piano, which was released by Time Being Books earlier this year; Time Being will publish a revised second edition of Blood to Remember in 2007.
Fishman is the 2006 recipient of the Long Island School of Poetry Award from the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. A 52-page retrospective of his work can be found at 3 Candles. |
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